A system on a chip (SOC) system, such as flash memory, have been widely adopted for use in consumer products. These SOCs may be found in different forms, for example in the form of a portable memory card that can be carried between host devices or as a solid state disk (SSD) embedded in a host device. Debugging, integrating, and testing such devices presents unique challenges because of the complexity of the device architecture and speed of operation. To determine the root cause of device failures during development and deployment of such devices requires the creation of sophisticated high speed debugging tools and methods. Debugging and system testing for system on chip (“SoC”) devices may be more complicated due to complex hardware and software interactions. Every event from the system should have a time stamp associated with it that can be used for debugging or testing. The time stamp should be accurate, but could take up excessive and unnecessary bandwidth if the time stamp is too long. Shorter time stamps that are issued more frequently may need increased storage to track them.